It is customary, I have noticed, in
publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of
apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of
them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when
every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is
threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily
reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite
young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes
cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children,
enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married
men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the
cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed - then it is obviously a
task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher
example before the world.

For some time - I am now forty-seven - I had
been feeling this with increasing urgency. And when not only my
wife and her four sisters, but the vicar of my parish, the
Reverend Simeon Whey, approached me with the same suggestion, I
felt that delay would amount to sin. That sin, by many persons,
is now lightly regarded, I am, of course, only too well
aware. That its very existence is denied by others is a fact
equally familiar to me. But I am not one of them. On every
ground I am an unflinching opponent of sin. I have continually
rebuked it in others. I have strictly refrained from it in
myself. And for that reason alone I have deemed it incumbent
upon me to issue this volume.

I propose in the first instance to deal with my earliest
surroundings and the influence exerted upon me by my father.
Believing as I do that every man (and to a lesser extent every
woman) is almost entirely the product of his or her personal
endeavours. I cannot pretend, of course, to attach much
importance to merely paternal influence. Nevertheless in the
lives of each one of us it undoubtedly plays a certain part. And
although my father had numerous faults, as I afterwards
discovered and was able to point out to him, he yet brought to
bear on me the full force of a frequently noble character.

That such was his duty I do not of course deny. But duty well
done is rare enough to deserve a tribute. And in days such as
these, when fatherhood is so lightly regarded, and is so
frequently, indeed, accidental, too much attention can surely
not be given to so opposite an instance.

At the time of my birth, then, and until his
death, my father was a civic official in a responsible position,
being a collector of outstanding accounts for the Consolidated
Water Board. In addition, he was one of the most respected and
trustworthy agents of the Durham and West Hartlepool Fire and
Burglary Insurance Company, a sidesman of the Church of St
James-the-Less in Camberwell, and the tenant of Mon Repos, Angela Gardens. This was one of some
thirty-six admirably conceived houses of a similar and richly
ornamented architecture, the front door of each being flanked
and surmounted by diamond-shaped panes of blue and vermilion
glass; and though it was true that this particular house had
been named by the landlord in a foreign tongue, it must not be
assumed that this nomenclature in any way met with my father's
approval. On the contrary, he had not only protested, but such
was his distrust of French morality that he had always insisted,
both for himself and others, upon a strictly English
pronunciation.

Somewhat under lower middle height, my father, even as a boy,
had been inclined to corpulence, a characteristic, inherited by
myself, that he succeeded in retaining to the end of his
life. Nor did he ever lose - or not to any marked extent -
either the abundant hair that grew upon his scalp, his glossy
and luxurious moustache, or his extraordinarily powerful
voice. This was a deep bass that in moments of emotion became
suddenly converted into a high falsetto, and he never hesitated,
in a cause that he deemed righteous, to employ it to its full
capacity. Always highly coloured, and the fortunate possessor of
an exceptionally large and well-modelled nose, my father's eyes
were of a singularly pale, unwinking blue, while in his massive
ears, with their boldly outstanding rims, resided the rare
faculty of independent motion.

My mother, on the other hand, presented hardly a feature that
could, in the strictest sense, have been called beautiful,
although she was somewhat taller than my father, with eyes that
were similar in their shade of blue. Like my father's, too, her
nose was large, but it had been built on lines that were
altogether weaker, and the slightly reddish down upon her upper
lip might even by some people have been considered a
disfigurement. She had inherited, however, together with five
hundred pounds, an apparently gentle disposition, and was a
scion or scioness of the Walworth Road branch of the great
family of Robinson. Herself the eldest of the nine daughters of
Mortimer Robinson, a well-known provision merchant, my father
had claimed relationship for her, albeit unsuccessfully, with
Peter Robinson of Oxford Street, while he used half humorously
to assert her connection with the fictional character known as
Robinson Crusoe. Clean in her habits, quiet about the house, and
invariably obedient to his slightest wish, he had very seldom
indeed, as he often told me, seriously regretted his choice of a
wife.

With sufficient capital, therefore, not only
to furnish his house, but to pay its first year's rent and
establish an emergency fund, my father might well have been
supposed by an ignorant observer to be free from every
anxiety. Such was not the case, however, and he was obliged,
almost immediately, to face one of the sternest ordeals of his
married life. Ardently desiring increase, it was not for nine
and a half months that Providence saw fit to answer his prayers,
and as week succeeded week and the cradle still remained empty,
only his unfaltering faith saved him from despair. But the hour
came at last, and so vividly has my father described it to me
that I have long since shared its triumphant joy.

Born at half-past three on a February
morning, the world having been decked with a slight snow-fall,
it was then that my mother's aunt, Mrs Emily Smith, opened the
bedroom door and emerged on the landing. My father had gone
outside to lean over the gate, and was still leaning there when
she opened the door, but my mother's mother, with another of my
mother's aunts, were standing with bowed heads at the foot of
the stairs. Prone in the parlour, and stretched in uneasy
attitudes, five of her eight sisters were snatching a troubled
sleep, while two fellow-members of my mother's Mothers' Guild
were upon their knees in the back kitchen. But for the fact,
indeed, that two of my mother's sisters had not, at that time,
had their tonsils removed, the whole house would have been
wrapped in the profoundest stillness.

My mother's mother was the first to see Mrs Smith, though she
only saw her, as it were, through a mist. Mrs Smith was the
first to speak, in a voice tremulous with emotion.

`Where's Augustus?' she said. Augustus was my father's name.

`He's just gone outside,' said my mother's mother.

Something splashed heavily on the hall linoleum. It was a drop
of moisture from Mrs Smith's forehead.

`Tell him,' she said, `that he's the father of a son.'

My mother's mother gave a great cry. My
father was beside her in a single leap. Always, as I have said,
highly coloured, his face at this moment seemed literally on
fire. The two fellow-members of my mother's Mothers' Guild,
accompanied by my father's five sisters-in-law, rushed into the
hall. Mrs Smith leaned over the banisters.

`A boy,' she said. `It's a boy.'

`A boy?' said my father.

`Yes, a boy,' said Mrs Smith.

There was a moment's hush, and then Nature had its way. My
father unashamedly burst into tears. My mother's mother kissed
him on the neck just as the two fellow-members burst into a
hymn; and a moment later, my mother's five sisters burst
simultaneously into the doxology. Then my father recovered
himself and held up his hand.